You are here

The Image of an Ottoman City

Imperial Architecture and Urban Experience in Aleppo in the 16th and 17th Centuries

Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh

This urban and architectural study of Aleppo, a center of early modern global trade, draws upon archival and narrative texts, architectural evidence, and contemporary theoretical discussions of the relation between imperial ideology, urban patterns and rituals, and architectural form. The first two centuries of Ottoman rule fostered tremendous urban development and reorientation through judiciously sited acts of patronage. Monumental structures endowed by Ottoman officials both introduced a new imperial architecture from Istanbul and incorporated formal elements from the local urban visual language. By viewing the urban and social contexts of these acts, tracing their evolution over two centuries, and examining their discussion in Ottoman and Arabic sources, this book proposes a new model for understanding the local reception and adaptation of imperial forms, institutions and norms.

Biographical note

Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh, Ph.D. (1999) in Art History, University of California Los Angeles, is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of California, Davis. She has published on the urban and architectural history of Islamic societies.

Readership

All those interested in the history and theory of empires, Islamic art, architecture and urbanism, Ottoman and Mamluk history, and early modern Islamic society.

Reviews

Winner of the 2006 Spiro Kostof Award
'The book is excellently produced, as one would expect from Brill..'
Peter Clark, Asian Affairs, 2005.'... an imaginatively conceptualized, rigorously researched, and carefully written study...''...is sophisticated and intellectually mature, a model of scholarship in the Kostof tradition...'

In Politics of Honor Başak Tuğ examines moral and gender order of mid-eighteenth-century Anatolia through petitions and court records to reveal the new and existing mechanisms of social surveillance to overcome imperial anxieties about provincial “disorder”.

Ines Aščerić-Todd, American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates

In Dervishes and Islam in Bosnia, Ines Aščerić-Todd explores the importance of dervish orders and Sufism in the formation of Muslim society in the first two centuries of Ottoman rule in Bosnia (15th - 16th centuries C.E.).

In Selim III, Social Order and Policing in Istanbul at the End of the Eighteenth Century Betül Başaran examines Selim III’s social control measures and Istanbul’s dynamic population, urging us to go beyond mechanistic models of borrowing that focus primarily on European influence in discussions...

edited by Eyal Ginio and Elie Podeh, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

The Ottoman Middle East discusses various political, social, cultural and economic aspects of the Ottoman Middle East. By using various textual and visual documents, produced in the Ottoman Empire, the collection offers new insights into the matrix of life under Ottoman rule.

edited by Duygu Köksal, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul and Anastasia Falierou, University of Athens

In A Social History of the Late Ottoman Women, Duygu Köksal and Anastasia Falierou bring together new research on women of different geographies and communities of the late Ottoman Empire focusing particularly on the ways in which women gained power and exercised agency.

Gábor Kármán, University of Leipzig and Lovro Kunčević, Institute for Historical Sciences of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Art, Dubrovnik

The European Tributary States is the first attempt to give a comprehensive overview of the similarities and differences in the Ottoman Empire’s relationship to Moldavia, Wallachia, Transylvania, Ragusa, the Crimean Khanate as well as the Cossack Hetmanate.